Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/25 - Deadpool Buys an MVNO

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Uber loses its license in London, the web’s founder launches a “contract” to save it, eBay sells StubHub, the Threadrippers seem to be the real deal, Deadpool is buying a mobile carrier and Elon Musk knows why those windows cracked. Sponsors: Mealime DollarShaveClub.com/ride Links: Uber loses London licence after TfL finds drivers faked identity (The Guardian) Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web (The Guardian) EBay to sell StubHub to Viagogo for about $4 billion in cash (CNBC) India's financial services firm Paytm raises $1B (TechCrunch) The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm (AnandTech) AMD confirms 64-core Threadripper 3990X for 2020 (The Verge) Ryan Reynolds now owns a stake in budget carrier Mint Mobile (Engadget) Elon Musk explains why Tesla’s Cybertruck windows smashed during presentation (The Verge) Tesla's polarizing Cybertruck was preordered 200,000 times within 3 days (USA Today) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Monday, November 25th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Uber loses its license in London. The Webb's founder launches a contract to save it. eBay sells Stubhub. The Threadrippers seem to be the real deal. Deadpool is buying a mobile carrier and Elon Musk thinks he knows why those windows cracked. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Uber has lost its license to operate in the city of London. obviously one of Uber's biggest markets globally. After authorities discovered that more than 14,000 trips were taken with uninsured drivers, quoting the Guardian,

Transport for London announced the decision not to renew the ride-hailing firm's license at the end of a two-month probationary extension granted in September. Uber was told then it needed to address issues with checks on drivers, insurance and safety, but has failed to satisfy the capital's transport authorities. TFL said on Monday it had identified a, quote, pattern of failures by Uber, including several breaches that place passengers and their safety at risk. In a statement, TFL said, quote, despite addressing some of these issues, TFL does not have confidence that similar issues will not recur in the future, which has led it to conclude that the company is not fit and proper at this time, end quote. The decision, will not see Uber cars disappear. from London immediately, as the firm has said it would appeal and could continue to operate pending the outcome, provided it launched official proceedings within 21 days, end quote. Now, Uber does have priors with the TFL. The agency refused to renew Uber's license in the past, but in 2017, Uber convinced judges to give it a 15-month license to continue. In this particular case, the uninsured drivers, we are talking about, amount to 43 drivers who,

the TFL said, were able to upload their photos to other driver's accounts and thus were able to pick up writers even though they weren't technically Uber-approved drivers or the drivers that the writers were expecting. Uber says it disagrees with the decision and again plans to appeal. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has launched what he is calling contract for the web to safeguard the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations, and what he calls an impending digital dystopia. The initiative is backed by more than 150 organizations including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The contract requires signatories to make concrete steps and commitments to prevent the web

from being abused, quoting the Guardian. The contract, which has been worked on by 80 organizations for more than a year, outlines nine central principles to safeguard the web, three each for governments, companies, and individuals. The document published by Berners-Lee's Web Foundation has the backing of more than 150 organizations from Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and Facebook to the Digital Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the time of this writing, Amazon has not endorsed the principles. Those who back the contract must show they are implementing the principles and working on solutions to the tougher problems or face being removed from the list of endorsers. If the stipulation is properly enforced, some may not last long.

A report from Amnesty International accuses Google and Facebook of, quote, enabling human rights harm at a population scale, end quote. The report comes weeks after Google was found to have acquired the personal health records of 50 million Americans without their consent. The contract's principles require governments to do all they can to ensure that everyone who wants to, can connect to the web and have their privacy respected. People should have access to whatever personal data is held on them and have the right to object or withdraw from having that data processed. Further principles oblige companies to make internet access affordable and calls on them to develop web services for people with disabilities and those who speak minority languages. To build

trust online, companies are compelled to simplify privacy settings by providing control panels where people can access their data and manage their privacy options in one place. Another principle requires companies to diversify their workforces, consult broad communities before and after they release new products, and assess the risk of their technology, spreading misinformation or harming people's behavior or personal well-being. Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally to fight for the web so it remains open to everyone everywhere. The forces taking the web in the wrong direction have always been very strong, Bernersley said. Whether you're a company or a government, controlling the web is a way to make huge profits or a way of ensuring you remain in power. The people are arguably the most important part of this because it's only the people who will be motivated to hold the other two to account, end quote.

So the obvious question here is, and don't get me wrong, I'm all for efforts in this direction. How can a company just signing on to this be more than just some form of PR whitewashing? Some of the things in this contract run directly contrary to some of the signatories' very business models. Is there some form of adjudication? Is there really any way to add teeth to kicking an organization out of the contract? More details, please. eBay plans to sell its Stubhub subsidiary to Swiss ticket resale marketplace via Go-go for about $4 billion in cash. Combined, the two sites would sell tickets in more than 70 countries.

Quoting CNBC, the sale is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2020, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. eBay shares jumped roughly 2% on the news. Quote, over the past several months, eBay's leadership. team and board of directors have been engaged in a thorough review of our current strategies and portfolio, and we concluded that this was the best path forward for both eBay and Stubhub. Intram eBay CEO Scott Schenkel said in a release, the companies are likely to operate independently for some time, while executives examined the best way to integrate the businesses, representatives for eBay and Villagogo told CNBC, end quote.

Worth noting that Viagogo founder and CEO Eric Backer co-founded Stubhubh originally back in the day, but he left that company before it was sold to eBay for $310 million in 2007. So from the file labeled things I did not think I'd ever be talking about, actor Ryan Reynolds has apparently purchased an ownership stake in MintMobil, the low-cost wireless carrier. Now, of course, I have to acknowledge that MintMobil is a past and probably future sponsor of the show but that's not why I'm telling you about this. I'm telling you about this because, what? Quoting and gadget. This isn't strictly a publicity move either. Reynolds will help with

communications and marketing, but he'll also be involved in, quote, strategic decision-making, end quote, at mint. You're not likely to see Deadpool hawking the service, unfortunately, but his actor will have a very real say in the future of a wireless carrier. To some extent, this reflects the shifting cellular landscape in the U.S. While the top four carriers, AT&T, Sprint T-Mobile, and Engadget Parent Verizon, still tend to dominate. There's been a rush of virtual providers like Mint, Ting, and Google Fi that have experimented with different business models.

Reynolds's involvement gives their unconventional formulas a dash of extra credibility, even if they're not about to topple the establishment, end quote. Insert your own Deadpool meme here, I guess. Interesting raise for sure. I think I suggested a long read about this company a while back, but paytm is a company that's increasingly on my radar. The India-based financial services startup has raised $1 billion in a round led by TRO price, valuing the company at around $16 billion. Paytm has raised more than $3.3 billion to date. But what I wasn't aware of is how much competition pay TM is facing, and thus may be why it needs so much money. Quoting TechCrunch. The big bucks come as India turns into the newest payments battleground for major global giants, Google, Walmart, and Facebook. According to Credit Suisse, the digital payments market in India will be worth $1 trillion in the next four years up from about $200 billion currently.

According to industry estimates, more than 100 million people in India today use mobile payments services, PATM, which led the local market in peer-to-peer mobile payments two years ago, saw its daily usage skyrocketed. after New Delhi invalidated much of the cash in circulation in the country in late 2016. Other local mobile wallet services such as MobyQuick and Free Charge also reported growth during the period. At a company party in late 2016, founder Sharma told ecstatic employees that, quote, Nobody can beat pay TM. India finally has its own technology giant, end quote. But in the following months, a score of companies including Amazon, Google, and Samsung

entered the payments market in India, leveraging an open payments infrastructure called UPI, built by a coalition of banks and backed by the government. National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI infrastructure, revealed earlier this month that UPI had surpassed 100 million users. In October this year alone, UPI topped a billion transactions. Google Pay and Flipkart's phone P today lead the peer-to-peer payments, according to industry estimates. Google Pay has amassed over 67 million monthly active users, the company revealed earlier this year. Flipkart's phone P is valued at $10 billion. Paytm in the meantime has focused on

expanding to other categories such as e-commerce platforms, games, and ticketing businesses. The company is also aggressively trying to sign up merchants across small cities and towns in India. The company, which is serving merchants in over 2,000 towns and cities in the country leads the peer-to-peer merchant market, according to internal slides seen by TechCrunch, end quote. Like most unicorns, though, paytm could use the money. The company posted a $549 million loss in the fiscal year that ended in March up from a $206 million loss the year previous. But then, OMP and Amazon Pay combined lost a similar amount of money in India over the same

period of time. It's been a while since we've featured a review on. on this show. How about a review of those new AMD, Risen, 24, and 32 core chips, the Threadripper 3960x and 3970X, who better than an Antech to lay it all out, quote, I have never used the word bloodbath in a review before. It seems messy, violent, and a little bit gruesome. But when we look at the results from the new AMD ThreadRipper processors, it seems more than appropriate. AMD has scored wins across almost all of our benchmark suite. In anything embarrassingly parallel, it rules the roost by a large margin, except for our one AVX 512 benchmark. Single-threaded performance trails

the high-frequency mainstream parts, but it is still very close. Even in memory-sensitive workloads, an issue for the previous generation, thread-ripper parts, even in memory-sensitive workloads, an issue for the previous generation thread-ripper parts. The new chiplet design has pushed performance to that next level. These new thread ripper processors win on core count, on high IPC, on high frequency, and on fast memory. If you had told me three years ago that AMD were going to be ruling the roost in the high-end desktop market with high-performance 32-core processors on a leading-edge manufacturing node, I would have told you to lay off the heavy stuff.

But here we are, and AMD isn't done yet, teasing a 64-core version for, next year. This is a crazy time we live in, and I'm glad to be a part of it. Price, no object. The new thread river processors are breathing new life into the high-end desktop market. AMD is going to have to work hard to top this one. Intel is going to have to have a shift in its design strategy to compete, end quote. Yes, as just mentioned, AMD isn't resting on their laurels, apparently. They confirmed today a 64-4.4.4. for 128 thread Ripper 3990X coming next year, quoting the verge. Although AMD isn't releasing much information about the coming CPU itself,

a leaked presentation slide claims that it will have 288 megabytes of total cash and a TDP of 280. Although that means the CPU requires a hefty cooling solution, it's interesting, its TDP is the same as AMD's existing thread river chips despite the doubled core count. That said, we currently don't know anything about the upcoming CPU's clock speeds, so there's speculation these could be lower to maintain its thermal performance. A 64-core CPU isn't going to be useful for many consumers, even before considering that its presumably high price will keep it out of most people's hands in the first place. AMD's press release name drops Hollywood creators as a target audience.

But over the past few years, AMD has been aggressively boosting the number of cores in even its mainstream desktop CPUs, which now include the 16-core Risen 93950X, while 64 cores might be the exclusive domain of multi-thousand-dollar thread-wipper flagships for now, at AMD's current rate, it might make it into a consumer processor in just a few short years, end quote. Finally today, Elon Musk has explained why he thinks the cybertruck's windows cracked during that cyber truck unveiling last week. Quoting the Verge, Musk says he knows what went wrong and explain things on Twitter. Right before the metal ball test,

Von Hulleson smacked the door with a sledgehammer on stage to prove its durability. And unlike the glass, it was fine. And Musk says this impact, quote, cracked base of glass, which is why the windows subsequently smashed when hit by the ball. This seems plausible, especially as Musk also shared a slow motion video of Von Hullhausen performing the same exact test before the event, with the ball bouncing harmlessly off the window. The combined impacts likely weaken the glass setting the stage for the eventual smash. Though why the back window broke as well isn't clear, the passenger door

didn't get womped by the sledgehammer, end quote. Also worth pointing out, there have been 187,000 pre-orders for Cybertruck in the first three-day. of the pre-order window. Quoting USA Today, a day earlier, the Apollo-A-Alto-based automaker hit 146,000 pre-orders within the truck's first 48 hours. In order to pre-order the much-buzzed about cyber truck, customers had to drop a $100 refundable deposit, according to the company's website. In the tweet, Musk seems to have conflated pre-orders with orders. Quote, 146,000 Cybertruck orders so far

with 42% choosing dual, 41% choosing try, and 17% single motor, Musk tweeted on Saturday. He later tweeted an update saying 187,000, end quote. So as I mentioned on Friday, this is a holiday week here in the U.S.

We are going to have a live, regular show tomorrow, but then we're going to take Wednesday and Thursday off. We'll be back on Friday with a special episode, and then we'll be back live and normal a week from today, Monday, December 2nd. So tune in as usual tomorrow, tune in for something special on Friday, and then everything is back to normal beginning Monday of next week. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating.